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Victory!

* Anatole Kaletsky: Associate Editor of The Times* Professor Norman Stone: Professor of International Relations and Director of the Russian Centre at Bilkent University, Ankara.* Alexei Pushkov: Anchor of the most popular Russian TV programme “Post Scriptum” which has considerable influence on Russian public perception of international events.

Speakers against the motion:

* Edward Lucas: Central and Eastern Europe correspondent for the The Economist and author of The New Cold War: How the Kremlin Menaces Both Russia and the West (2008).

Thursday, December 01, 2005

I can understand pure protectionism more easily. That is selfish andtimid, but at least it's not disguised as altruism. But a lot of themoaning about the "brain drain" from east European countries likeLatvia, Lithuania and Poland makes out that it is having a dreadfuleffect on these poor post-communist countries (for which read"aboriginal reservations"). The natives, so this patronising argumentgoes, would be so much happier living their traditional lifestyle(muddy, cold, vodka-soaked) than being spoiled by exposure to thetemptations of western culture.

Instead of celebrating the marvellous opportunities that migration ina united Europe presents, the old rich countries are pretending thatit's a disaster. How dare those funny little people with theirincomprehensible languages search for a better life elsewhere? Howdare they respond to market signals that tell them that their labouris more valuable abroad than at home? How dare they try to learn newskills? They should stop having ideas above their station, and insteadstay at home and go folkdancing in those picturesque felt boots, andwait gratefully for the nice new roads that the rich world is going togive them later in the century.

In theory, of course, migration combined with bad government can makea country collapse. Zimbabwe is a good example. There may be some signof that in the more benighted bits of central Asia (I am sure thatanyone who can leave Turkmenistan has done so). But what's happeningin the post-communist countries of eastern Europe is quite different.

For a start, the current wave of migration is quite small. Many morepeople moved immediately after the collapse of communism: Jews,Russians and Germans shifted around in their hundreds of thousands.But this was less politically sensitive. Germany, albeit not veryenthusiastically, feels that it has to be the ethnic homeland of allTeutons, however tenuous their connection. Israel feels the same aboutJews (who in some cases got their Israeli passports and moved on).Russians in the former Soviet empire were welcome home, regardless ofwhether they were really persecuted, or just unable to cope with theend of their imperial privilege.

The difference now is that the migration is economic, not political,and it's much more short-term. People are going abroad and tryingtheir luck. Sometimes it doesn't work out. Qualifications may beunrecognised, or employers unscrupulous. But it's not the end of theworld: if Greece is no good, try Italy. If Britain is overcrowded,there's Ireland. If nothing works, then there's a bus back home. Andif it does work, the pay-offs are great: money earned can be capitalfor a business or pay for education, or a better house. Simply seeinghow a hospital, farm or office in another country works is amind-stretching experience.

In short: free trade in people, as in goods or services, matches wantsand preferences precisely, creating more winners than losers. True,spending long periods abroad is not ideal for marriages, or forparenting, or for caring for elderly relatives if people. But ifstaying put means rotting your life away with ill-paid, boring work,that's not exactly ideal either.

Some east European employers are complaining. Their nice pool of cheaplabour is indeed draining away. But if they want to tempt the migrantsback, they'll have to work at it, by offering better pay andconditions, and raising productivity through better management andmore modern equipment. Help! At this rate, those muddy aborigines mayend up richer than us.

Edward Lucas is central and eastern Europe correspondent of The Economist

In most of the countries I cover, the prime minister lives in abubble, travelling in a large black shiny car from one well-guardedlocation to another, surrounded by obsequious advisers basking in hisreflected glory.

If he goes to a restaurant at all, it is a glitzy one with a privateroom. If the bill is paid at all, it is certainly not something thatbothers him directly.That's certainly true in Belarus, which I have just been discussing atan excellent conference organised by the Open Estonia Foundation (partof the Soros philanthropic empire).I follow Belarus fairly closely (in so far as I can without being ableto go there), but I was struck by the fierce new rules on internetaccess, which will deprive non-governmental organisations of theirbroadband connections.The draft new law on subversion threatens hefty prison sentences forcrimes such as "discrediting Belarus in co-operation withforeign-financed organisations and the mass media".But outside intervention will at best have a marginal impact. The realproblem is the deep Sovietisation of Belarussian society, which hasatomised and demoralised it to an extent unseen elsewhere in the region.The building blocks of democratic change - impatient middle classes,patriotism and religion - simply don't exist. So the most importantthing is to do no harm.A lively debate about economic sanctions ended with a consensus (Ithink) that a Soviet-style economic collapse was not going to happen,and that making Belarus poorer and more dependent on Russia wasunlikely to stoke pro-western and democratic feelings.The conference's high quality made up for the fact that my otherplans, to see some Estonian policy wonks, had been ruined by the tripof my fellow-countryman, Tony Blair. His heavily guarded convoy oflimousines had brought traffic to a standstill for large chunks of theday and the people I most wanted to meet were too busy, either becauseof him, or because of the disruption caused.But late in the evening I got a message that some government adviserswere at a restaurant and I was welcome to join them. That was niceenough: they might have had enough self-important British visitors forone day.As we chatted about Russia's slide to autocracy, the psychological warit wages against the Baltics, and the strange and dangerous way inwhich Western Europe seems to ignore this, a couple more people turnedup, pulling up chairs to the table, sitting down and tucking into thewine and tapas.They included the Estonian Prime Minister Andrus Ansip. I wasimpressed with four things. First, he was not spending time with ahand-picked group of top policy-advisers for a high-powereddiscussion, but hanging out with a rather random bunch ranging fromvery senior to rather junior, just to chew over the events of the day.Second, the conversation flowed naturally. I heard nobody laughingloudly at the boss's jokes, or falling silent when he spoke. Third,the other customers in the (very unpretentious) restaurant, and thestaff, showed not the slightest bit of surprise. Fourth, before Ansipleft, he made a point of checking that somebody was dealing with the bill.I told him how impressed I was, and why. "Estonia's like that," hereplied. "Some German tourists asked for my autograph in a restaurantrecently, just because they were so surprised that I would eat therelike a normal person."Sadly, I can't imagine this happening in Britain with Tony Blair anymore than it would in Belarus with Alexander Lukashenko. Lucky Estonia.# Edward Lucas is Central and Eastern Europe correspondent for TheEconomist.

Sunday, November 20, 2005

It's easy to caricature Poland as a country of dim, superstitious peasants. Iremember CNN's Ted Turner doing his unfunny impression of a "Polishmine-detector"- putting his hands to his ears and hopping clumsily. A PolishDeputy Foreign Minister, Radek Sikorski, forced him to apologise.

émigré who has now become Poland's new defence minister and is making wavesagain. He has declassified his country's Warsaw Pact files, handing them over tothe national archives. But the international reaction to this reflects anothercaricature of Poland, no less offensive, and much more dangerous.There were plenty of snide remarks about Sikorski's move, but the FinancialTimes will serve as an example. It wrote that Poland "risked inflaming tensionswith Russia" and was "prepared to incur Moscow's wrath". Leaving aside the mixedmetaphor (a tendon can be inflamed, but not a tension) this seems a perversespin on the affair.Russia has made no public protest about the opening of the archives. Nor,according to Sikorski, has it complained privately. So Western opinion isannoyed not because Poland is picking a fight with Russia, but because it isdoing something that might just possibly at some point annoy the Kremlin - withthe subtext that this would always be the wrong thing to do.That's a strange way of looking at things and one that is increasingly prevalentin Western capitals. Poland and the Baltic states are seen as faraway placeswith incomprehensible habits, values and grudges, bent on disrupting theimportant business of getting lots of cheap oil and gas from that nice Mr Putin.If Russia hadn't thought about complaining about the declassification before, itcertainly has every opportunity to do so now.It doesn't really matter what is in the archives; Soviet plans for nuclear war,plus the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia will probably be the most interesting.Other countries - such as the former East Germany - have already declassifiedtheir bits of the files.The point is that the new Polish government is serious about wanting to clean upthe remains of the country's Communist past. It is doing so promptly, to adeafening lack of applause in the West. I find that baffling. Imagine if aformer Nazi-occupied country - France for example - still had a large pro-Naziparty that had managed to block the release of the Wehrmacht's wartime archivesthere. How cross everyone would be about it, and how glad if a stronglyanti-Nazi party came to power pledging to open the German military files (andthe Gestapo ones too, for that matter). That, roughly, is what has happened inPoland.The real reason why bien-pensant Western opinion-formers hate this sort of thingis that it sabotages the cosy, sloppy, moral equivalence that marked theirthinking during the Cold War years. If you are confronted with incontrovertibleevidence that the Soviet Union was both a monstrous dictatorship and anaggressive imperialist power, it becomes much harder to maintain that "the USAand the USSR were as bad as each other".The fact is that if it wasn't for America, Western Europe would have had a hardjob withstanding Soviet belligerence. Patriots like Colonel Ryszard Kuklinski -NATO's top spy in Communist-ruled Poland - knew that, which is why for a decadethey risked torture and death to work secretly for the West. But that part ofhistory is something that many people whose freedom he helped preserve wouldmuch rather forget, if they ever knew it in the first place.# Edward Lucas is Central and Eastern Europe correspondent for The Economist.

Reading the latest annual survey from the European Bank forReconstruction and Development (EBRD) of the progress of theex-captive nations in economics and institution-building, I wonderedabout an ideal world where the engineers are Czechs, the chefsHungarian, the soldiers Polish, the bureaucrats Estonian and themusicians Russian. And in a nightmare world, the bureaucrats areRussian, the soldiers Czechs, the chefs Estonian and so on. Such jokesare a good way to make friends - and lose them. No country likes todwell on its weak points (and I should say quickly, before my inboxstarts bursting with protests, that I have had many delicious meals inTallinn, know some very brave Czechs and highly efficient Russians).

But behind the more-or-less amusing stereotypes is a serious pointabout the right way to look at the post-Communist world. There are twotraps. One is defeatism, the other arrogance. The best example of thelatter came in the 1990s, when Russia was the unfortunate beneficiaryof a great deal of enthusiastic and intrusive Western advice andscrutiny. Locals and others complained with some justice that it waswrong to expect the country to meet Swiss standards of administrativeefficiency, German altruism in foreign policy, American workaholismand Dutch openness to foreign trade. It would be fairer to expect, atleast at first, Italian standards of public-sector efficiency, Frenchpolitical maturity, German flexibility and Swiss cultural openness.Such critics had a point. It was ludicrous, for example, to expect ahuge country emerging from decades of totalitarianism and isolation todevelop in the space of a few years the financial system of anadvanced capitalist country. The attempt to do so meant that hot moneysloshed round weak crooked institutions, leading to an inevitablefinancial bubble that cost millions of Russians their savings in 1998.

But it is wrong for two reasons to take the opposite view and say thatpost-communist countries are doing very well if they meet the worststandards of old Europe.

The first is that the collapse of Communism did give the chance of afresh start. In countries like France and Italy, many people stillsincerely believe that the system of past decades can work, with a bitof judicious tweaking. It was very hard, almost impossible, to believethat about Communism in 1989. Different countries approached thatfresh start in different ways and with different starting points, butit was there. Good policies paid off; bad ones brought a high price inlost time, wealth, jobs and happiness. Hungary got it right withprivatisation for example; the Czech Republic got it wrong. Slovakiawasted time under the dreadful Vladimir Meciar. Ukraine dithered,while Russia at least tried to privatise and liberalise.

Second, post-Communist countries don't have the luxury of hangingabout. Italy can still just about afford its comic-opera politics, forthe same reason that it can afford grand opera at La Scala: becauseit's a big rich country. Ukraine, if it wants to catch up thiscentury, can't.

What I'd really like from the EBRD is a detailed comparison thatincludes old Europe as well as new. It's good to see that in somerespects ex-Communist countries' business environments are nearingthose in Germany - a country the report uses as a benchmark. But itwould be even more interesting to see further comparisons. How doesHungary stack up against Austria? Or Estonia against Finland? Thatwould spur the ex-captive nations to greater efforts - and perhaps onsome fronts be a salutary shock to the richer countries' comfortablecomplacency.

Monday, November 14, 2005

Some of the tools are rusty; others are just plain useless. The skillsI struggled to acquire in communist-era Eastern Europe now seem asquaint as the ability to hunt a woolly mammoth or sharpen a flint axe.

Or do they? My biggest stumbling blocks: visas, communications andstaying fed, have all but vanished. Bluffing and subterfuge wereessential to get inside places like Ceausescu's Romania, CommunistCzechoslovakia, or the Soviet Union, and to work once there. Not anymore. I no longer envy colleagues for being dab hands at the telex(remember that?), or for their wiles in getting planned-economyrestaurants to provide food.Thankfully, it is no longer necessary to know the ins and outs ofMarxist theory, The ability to swap Lenin quotes with Communistapparatchiks counts for nothing. Languages matter less too: inpre-revolutionary Eastern Europe, you simply had to stumble throughyour irregular verbs, suffixes and declensions. The alternative was totalk only to a tiny bunch of polyglots; or else rely on a small poolof imperfect interpreters who were easy targets for secret policepressure.Most importantly, there's no risk to life and liberty. Nobody beatsyou up. I no longer feel overwhelmed by the moral courage of myinterviewees. Even the most unpleasant post-Communist politician isunlikely to be as revolting a liar and bully as, say, a Soviet-erasecret policeman.But some things have stayed the same. Despite a decade in thelimelight, plus EU and NATO membership for the lucky ones, much of theregion is once again below the Western editorial horizon. I rememberbeseeching my bosses (I wasn't at The Economist then, I should add) inthe late 1980s to take Yugoslavia seriously.Now the frozen conflicts of the Caucasus and Western Balkans are againtoo complicated and faraway for Western public attention to focus on.And ignorance is still amazing. Last week BBC World reported,straight-faced: "Poland is struggling to catch up its richerneighbours, Germany and [sic] Russia."More importantly, history is still the key. Understanding Polishpolitics is impossible without knowing the difference between theLondon and Lublin governments, or the difference between Pilsudski'sand Dmowski's concept of nationhood. Russia is stuck in the clovenpine of its history. In every country in the region, the simplest butmost revealing question is still: "What were you doing before 1989?And what did your parents do?".That touches the biggest similarity: Communism may be dead as anideology, but its psychological legacy lives on. Below a thin layer ofpost-Communist polish, anyone with a background in the old regime islikely to have a different emotional, social and moral wavelength:more hierarchical, more suspicious, more verbose, more rigid (andperhaps less principled) than the naive outsider might expect.Cutting through that still requires sharp thinking. As Raymond Smithexplains in his classic work on the communist mindset, Negotiatingwith the Soviets, the trick is to decide quickly whether to befriend,bully or beg. A haughty approach (done with conviction) gets youalmost everywhere: kow-towing to higher authority is deeply ingrained.If you can stomach it, getting friendly may work too - though you mayhave to do a favour in return: personal connections were, after all,the fuel that kept planned economies functioning. If all else fails,grovel: humiliation is cheap if it gets you what you want.It varies, of course. Belarus, Transdniestr and the like are theworst. They just happen to be where I find my flint axe quite useful too.

Sunday, November 13, 2005

I first came across them in the 'Infobiuras' of the Lithuanianpro-independence movement, Sajudis, in early 1990.

Young, bright-eyed Americans, Canadians and Australians, steeped byfervently patriotic parents in the history of countries they hardlyknew, bent on fulfilling their historical destiny. They translateddocuments into English, briefed journalists, advised politicians andgenerally brought a blast of optimistic, confident radicalism to thenervous, blurry world of collapsing Communism.Sometimes the results were more spectacular than productive. Duringone of the hairier moments of the Lithuanian independence struggle,when it seemed as though the West, with the honourable but minorexception of Iceland, was going to abandon Lithuania to the mercies ofSoviet stormtroopers, I remember hearing one beefy young Lithuanianémigré bellowing down the phone "Don't be such a f***ing jerk!" Iasked him who he'd been talking to. "The American ambassador inMoscow," he replied tersely.There were grown-ups too. The most impressive, Stasys Lozoraitis, ran,unsuccessfully, for president of Lithuania in 1993. He had spent hiswhole life as ambassador to the Vatican and United States, in quixoticservice to a country that most of the world thought had disappeared in1940. He was urbane, polyglot, amusing, and charismatic, with anItalian wife who added a rare touch of glamour and sophistication tothe drab, stodgy world of Lithuania. Elsewhere, these high-poweredémigrés included a deeply impressive Canadian-Latvian professor oflinguistics, a forceful young man who ran the Estonian section ofRadio Free Europe and an ambitious Polish refugee-journalist, whoafter studying at Oxford in the early 1980s spent time inSoviet-occupied Afghanistan with the resistance.The galaxy of talent had some black holes too. There was one adviserto a Baltic foreign ministry whose sole qualification was a diploma inbar management and a hard-drinking old bat in an economics ministrywhose previous job was as a junior public relations woman for a themepark. One of the most energetic and engaging Lithuanian émigrés turnedout to have been working for both the KGB and the Americans (in whatorder was never completely clear).But the presumption then was that even the most modest émigré talentwas badly needed. Even the most superficial knowledge of the way theWest worked was a big advantage. Knowing how to use a computer, handlephone messages, talk politely to strangers in English and organisetravel to faraway places were all rare skills.That changed quickly. But the best émigré talent is still around. TheCanadian professor, Vaira Vike-Freiberga, is now president of Latviaand one of the few East European politicians with a claim to worldstatus. The young man from Radio Free Europe, Tom Ilves, is now aleading member of the European Parliament. The Anglo-Polishjournalist, Radek Sikorski, has just been sworn in as defence minister.But the political balance has changed. Now the diaspora appearsprovincial and out of touch. In Toronto, Ealing and the Chicagosuburbs, they are still baking the old recipes, learning folk songs,sending children to Saturday school and keeping the church afloat. Butthe diaspora is no longer the political lungs of nationhood: thesource of free ideas and discussion, a constant reminder that theCommunist version of the past, present and future was an evil fiction.In politics, it's the homeland that's humming.But not in economics. A million East Europeans or more have goneabroad in search of jobs and education. That raises a big question forthe ex-captive nations: can they ever attract these bright, mobilepeople back home?

Saturday, November 12, 2005

Belarusaitis used to be a rare affliction. One symptom is visitingMinsk frequently, a clean and spacious city, but not distinguished byits aesthetic attraction, to put it mildly. Another is a love ofinflicting obscure details of Belarussian history on unsuspectingpeople. "Did you know that there used to be two rival Belarussiangovernments-in-exile? One dates from 1918 and the other—which has nowfolded—from 1944". As my eyes light up and start swivelling, myinterlocutors look increasingly puzzled and start edging away.

That's just embarrassing. But a more dangerous symptom is wishfulthinking about the chances for political change. I know: I was so fedup with the bureaucratic, corrupt regime of Vyacheslav Kebich that Ilonged for Alexander Lukashenka to win the presidential elections in1994. To my lasting embarrassment, I even wrote favourably about himin The Economist. A populist with a strong anti-corruption message,who genuinely engaged with people when he campaigned, seemed a welcomebreath of fresh air.

It soon became clear that things were going wrong. A couple of yearslater I interviewed the president, when Ford opened a car plantoutside Minsk (they soon had to close it). His answers were so erraticand off-the-point that it was hard to fit them into the article. Eventhe bits I could use didn't make it into print: the Economist crunchedthem into the anonymous "Some top Belarussians think this [the plant]is the start of something big". His press people, who had beenexpecting a cover-story, have never allowed me near him since.

Now I worry that other people have Belarusaitis worse than me. Acountry that used to be a black hole is now attracting a lot ofwestern interest. This chiefly manifests itself in a rich programme ofseminars and handouts for Belarussian opposition organisations. Theaim is to present a real challenge to the Lukashenka regime in theelections next year.

It's easy to see why excitement is growing. The opposition has agreedon a single candidate, the multilingual physicist AlexanderMilinkevic. When I met him a few years ago I found him not just cleverand honest, but sane and sensible—which is more than can be said formany of the chancers, scroungers, losers and nutters who have made upmuch of the Belarussian opposition in the past.

He faces formidable obstacles—and not just that the election campaignand count will be rigged against him. Another is the Belarusaitis ofhis own foreign supporters. What many westerners fail to realise isthat support for Mr Lukashenka and a close alliance with Russia, plussuspicion towards Poland, the West, and the opposition are not justthe product of the regime's propaganda, but also the sincere feelingsof a large chunk of the population. There is evidence to show thatthese feelings are eroding (for which three cheers) but they are stillstrong.

The Belarusaitis-driven enthusiasm of Mr Milinkevic's westernsupporters threatens his appeal to potential voters at home. Theregime is longing to present him as the representative of a Polishfifth-column that wants to bring Belarus under the cultural, politicaland economic domination of the west: ie joining not just the EU butNato, fighting in Iraq, sponsoring Chechen terrorism and being anAl-Qaida target (no it isn't logical, but that's never bothered them).Plus he supposedly wants to sell the country to foreign speculators.Which (caricatures aside) is pretty much what Belarus needs. Butsaying it loudly won't help the good guys win.

Monday, October 31, 2005

Belarusaitis used to be a rare affliction. One symptom is visitingMinsk frequently, a clean and spacious city, but not distinguished byits aesthetic attraction, to put it mildly. Another is a love ofinflicting obscure details of Belarussian history on unsuspectingpeople. "Did you know that there used to be two rival Belarussiangovernments-in-exile? One dates from 1918 and the other—which has nowfolded—from 1944". As my eyes light up and start swivelling, myinterlocutors look increasingly puzzled and start edging away.

That's just embarrassing. But a more dangerous symptom is wishfulthinking about the chances for political change. I know: I was so fedup with the bureaucratic, corrupt regime of Vyacheslav Kebich that Ilonged for Alexander Lukashenka to win the presidential elections in1994. To my lasting embarrassment, I even wrote favourably about himin The Economist. A populist with a strong anti-corruption message,who genuinely engaged with people when he campaigned, seemed a welcomebreath of fresh air.

It soon became clear that things were going wrong. A couple of yearslater I interviewed the president, when Ford opened a car plantoutside Minsk (they soon had to close it). His answers were so erraticand off-the-point that it was hard to fit them into the article. Eventhe bits I could use didn't make it into print: the Economist crunchedthem into the anonymous "Some top Belarussians think this [the plant]is the start of something big". His press people, who had beenexpecting a cover-story, have never allowed me near him since.

Now I worry that other people have Belarusaitis worse than me. Acountry that used to be a black hole is now attracting a lot ofwestern interest. This chiefly manifests itself in a rich programme ofseminars and handouts for Belarussian opposition organisations. Theaim is to present a real challenge to the Lukashenka regime in theelections next year.

It's easy to see why excitement is growing. The opposition has agreedon a single candidate, the multilingual physicist AlexanderMilinkevic. When I met him a few years ago I found him not just cleverand honest, but sane and sensible—which is more than can be said formany of the chancers, scroungers, losers and nutters who have made upmuch of the Belarussian opposition in the past.

He faces formidable obstacles—and not just that the election campaignand count will be rigged against him. Another is the Belarusaitis ofhis own foreign supporters. What many westerners fail to realise isthat support for Mr Lukashenka and a close alliance with Russia, plussuspicion towards Poland, the West, and the opposition are not justthe product of the regime's propaganda, but also the sincere feelingsof a large chunk of the population. There is evidence to show thatthese feelings are eroding (for which three cheers) but they are stillstrong.

The Belarusaitis-driven enthusiasm of Mr Milinkevic's westernsupporters threatens his appeal to potential voters at home. Theregime is longing to present him as the representative of a Polishfifth-column that wants to bring Belarus under the cultural, politicaland economic domination of the west: ie joining not just the EU butNato, fighting in Iraq, sponsoring Chechen terrorism and being anAl-Qaida target (no it isn't logical, but that's never bothered them).Plus he supposedly wants to sell the country to foreign speculators.Which (caricatures aside) is pretty much what Belarus needs. Butsaying it loudly won't help the good guys win.

Twice at parties in the last week I've found myself gasping forbreath. Each time I was chatting to pillars of the right-wing Britishestablishment, solid Cold Warriors with whom I used to agree about thebig questions of Europe's future - America in, Germans down, Russiaout - and so forth.

But Euroscepticism is corroding those comforting and commendablecertainties. One of my pals, a newspaper editor, interrupted me as Ipraised the flat-taxes and other reforms sweeping across Europe fromthe new member states. "Oh, I'm not interested in that now. I'm for apull-out." In vain I tried to explain that the Central Europeans andBalts would regard his idea of a new EFTA - backed by NATO - as dottyand unworkable. The constitution had failed, he insisted, so the EUwas dead.Two days later it was one of Britain's leading right-wing polemicists,a man who as speechwriter for Margaret Thatcher honed some of thechoicest phrases of the Cold War. I was trying to interest him in theproblems of Europe's eastern fringes, so brilliantly outlined by mypredecessor, Robert Cottrell, in his recent survey in The Economist.He wasn't interested. The EU would collapse, and Britain should pullout as soon as possible. But what, I stuttered, would you do aboutMoldova, or Belarus? "Those countries," he replied loftily, "will haveto look after themselves." I could hardly believe my ears. A man who,only 20 years previously, had championed the captive nations' right tobe free of Soviet rule was now consigning the most vulnerable victimsof Communism to the scrap heap of history.There is something very odd going on here. Britain and British ideasof a wide, Atlanticist Europe have never been so popular in EasternEurope. Memories of betrayals, real or imagined, of Munich, of theWarsaw Uprising, at Yalta, of the Cossacks, of Hungarians in 1956 andCzechoslovaks in 1968, are fading into history. Instead, there isenthusiastic support for British ideas about EU reform, for TonyBlair's ideas about deregulation, dynamism, flexibility and so on.Countries wanting to join the EU see the British presidency as theirbig chance.By contrast, the Franco-German axis has never looked more out-of-dateand disreputable. In particular, Poles, Czechs and Slovaks have fallenout of love with France in a way I would have regarded as wildlyunlikely when I covered Central Europe in the 1980s and 1990s.Yet the people who should be celebrating as the winds of history blowtheir way have given up and are huddled below decks, sneering andjeering, lost in their own world of defunct sentimental nationalismand vainglorious wishful thinking.Fuelled by champagne and indignation, I asked both people for analternative. If consolidating democracy and stability in the WesternBalkans matters, what possible alternative is there than the bigcarrot of EU membership for countries that do the right things, oninstitution-building, the rule of law, treatment of minorities,crime-fighting, intelligence-sharing and so forth?I would like to report that they came up with ingenious solutions thatwould bring all the prosperity and other benefits of the EU withoutany of the bureaucracy, waste, corruption, pomposity and jargon thatfuels Euroscepticism in Britain and elsewhere.Not a bit of it. For the champions of the Cold War, Eastern Europe, itseems, is once again a collection of faraway countries of whom we knownothing. That was a callous and disgraceful phrase when used in 1938by Neville Chamberlain of Czechoslovakia. And it is callous anddisgraceful now.

A Pulitzer prize? Certainly. World-wide syndication? Certainly. Nowimagine that despite all that, no American publisher is willing topublish it.Inconceivable? Not if the subject is the equally shameful one of theSoviet Gulag and the publishers are not American, but Russian. Myfriend Anne Applebaum's accuracy, stylish prose and original researchwon her a Pulitzer Prize for her history of the camps. It has soldhundreds of thousands of copies in 28 editions around the world -except in Russia, where the book is taboo.Yet there is huge interest in the former captive nations of EasternEurope, where the book-buying public tends not to go for translationsof foreign non-fiction (the elite read such books in English, the restlack the time, money or inclination to read them at all).The hardback Gulag alone has sold a startling 70,000 copies in Poland.Her agent, the worldly wise New York-based Georges Borchardt, says thelevel of interest is "really quite amazing".Yet the country which suffered most from communism, providingcountless millions of victims to the terror machine, has nolocal-language version of the best-available account of what reallyhappened.One reason for poor sales in Putinland might be fatigue. During theglasnost era (and golly, we miss those days now) memoirs, historiesand other works about the crimes of Stalinism were everywhere. By the1990s, Russians were bored by miserable accounts of their miserablehistory. The new fashion in books was escapist detective fiction. Fairenough: even in Germany, where VergangenheitsbewŠltigung (conqueringone's past) is a matter of solemn private and public conscience, I cansee people have a limited appetite for yet more books about the Nazis.But does that explain why no Russian publisher wants to publish Gulag?As a devout believer in free markets, I concede the possibility thatthe book would sell so badly - worse, say, than an Icelandic cookbook- that translating and publishing it would be irrational. But I thinkit is more likely that the Russian publishers are practisingself-censorship.As Paul Baker and Susan Glasser point out in their excellent new bookKremlin Rising, Russian history is now a matter of high politics,where the Kremlin intervenes even against specific textbooks that theythink cast the Soviet Union in an excessively (read: any) unfavourablelight.Anne is trying to raise money to have it published by a bravenon-profit outfit, the Moscow School of Political Studies. But I haveanother suggestion. Why not try selling the all-Russian rights to apublisher in the Baltic states? At a minimum, it could sell among thenew generation of modern-minded Yevrorussky (European Russians) therewho find the cultural and political climate in the motherlandincreasingly repellent. Second, it would at least be available toreaders in Russia proper (who mainly order books via the internet anyway).The best thing would be if Kremlin then denounced the Baltic editionas a "provocation", or tried to respond by sponsoring a sanitisedaccount that put the Gulag "in the right perspective". There are toomany lies already. But the more that official Russian history sidlesaway from the democratic perspective and scholarly approach of theYeltsin years and back to the fawning, distorted junk of the past, theeasier it is to see Vladimir Putin and his "useful idiot" sycophantsin the West for what they really are.

Saturday, September 24, 2005

When an Estonian official once asked me about a suitable missionstatement or motto for his country. I suggested, only half-jokingly,"We told you so".Estonian smugness is of course legendary. But it is odd but truethat on most important questions the Estonians (and usually theLatvians and Lithuanians) have been right, whereas outsiders have beenwrong, sometimes wildly so.I remember being told forcefully in 1988 by one of the BBC's bestRussian-speakers that the "tiny Baltic Soviet republics" wanted onlyautonomy from the Kremlin. A handful of "nationalists", mainlyemigres, dreamed of full independence, but it was never going to happen.Luckily the Estonians took no notice. They never consideredthemselves to be a "Soviet republic", but rather an occupiedterritory. And they certainly did want independence. They went aheadwith the remarkable Congress of Estonia. Like its Latvian counterpart,this was an independently-elected alternative (ie non-Soviet)parliament which sought to recreate the republic abolished in 1940. Itwas an important reminder that the Baltic states were not seeking togain independence, but to regain it. This was the political equivalentof raising the Titanic—but most outsiders simply couldn't understandit, and dismissed the Congress as a nationalist stunt.Luckily the Estonians took no notice and focussed on restoring theprosperous, lawful country that was still—just—in living memory.That included modest attempts to restore Estonian as the statelanguage, and to try to induce the hundreds of thousands of Soviet-eramigrants to regularise their residence. The outside world (whichmostly has far harsher rules for migrants wanting to naturalise) wassure this would mean "Bosnia on the Baltic". There were countlessmonitoring missions and working groups. But the result was thathundreds of thousands of people have learnt Estonian (or Latvian) andgained citizenship. It's worked amazingly well.Then there was the senior IMF official in 1992 who told Estoniansto back "a common currency from Tallinn to Tashkent", rather thanreintroducing (very successfully as it proved) the kroon.Luckily the Estonians took no notice. The government of Mart Laaralso ignored outsiders who told them not to privatise rapidly andfully, but to give state industry a lengthy, gentle transition. Thespeed of economic change did feel rather alarming (I was running anewspaper in Tallinn at the time) but it was the right policy. So wasthe decision to abolish tariffs and subsidies (now, sadly,reintroduced as a condition of EU membership). Equally successful—andaccompanied by dire warnings at the time—was the flat tax.I still remember a western ambassador who was reduced tohelpless giggles in the mid-1990s when I suggested that all threeBaltic states would be EU members in ten years' time. The combinationof outside competition and Brussels bureaucracy would cause themcollapse overnight, he told me. And Nato membership was not even ajoke, just dangerous nonsense—as late as 2000, much of theforeign-policy establishment in western Europe was convinced that sucha step would destroy relations with Russia.It's quite a long list, which might make Estonians and theirBaltic colleagues rather sceptical of outside advice. It might also,perhaps. make outsiders cautious about offering it, and keener tolearn from Estonia's example. So I am pleased that Britishcommentators are now writing enthusiastically about Estonia's flattax. But there is some way to go: the Sunday Telegraph two weeks agowrote enthusiastically that: "Mr Laar is tipped as a Europeancommissioner when [sic] his country joins the EU in 2007."

Edward Lucas is central and eastern Europe correspondent of The Economistedwardlucas@economist.com

Monday, September 19, 2005

Birthday parties have an added frisson when they celebrate a highlycontroversial birth. There was quite a bash the other day in thestreets of Tiraspol—a city that few Europeans would find on the map,although well known to arms-dealers, drug-smugglers, spies andsuchlike. For Tiraspol is the soi-disant capital of the soi-disantstate of Transdniestr.Depending on your political standpoint, Transdniestr is a valiantbastion of Russian language and culture, battling against fascistswanting a Greater Romania, and against American global hegemony. Or itis a corrupt tinpot dictatorship in a breakaway province that survivesthanks only to being useful to some very nasty strands of Russian (andto some extent Ukrainian) political and economic life.But like it or not, Transdniestr was 15 years old this month. Itcelebrated in style with a huge fun-fair, bombastic speeches—and mostimportantly "official" delegations from the other three unrecognisedstatelets of the post-Soviet landscape: Nagorno-Karabakh, SouthOssetia, and Abkhazia.There is an intriguing air of unreality about the idea ofnon-countries conducting pretend diplomacy with each other. During theCold War, the Polish government-in-exile in London used to havemeetings with the surviving Baltic diplomats, stranded there in dustyembassies while their countries were de facto part of the SovietUnion. Their status was a bit different though: the Balts still haddiplomatic status (because Britain didn't recognise the Sovietannexation) whereas the Poles were private citizens—at least untilPresident Lech Walesa invited them to Warsaw in 1990, and, gloriously,retrospectively recognised their legitimacy.For less noble reasons, Transdniestrians also hang on, hoping thatstubbornness will eventually bear fruit. But they don't exactly exudeconfidence. The official news agency, Olvia-press, recently publisheda fascinating commentary "exposing" the various western plots aimed atdestabilising Transdniestr by means of a "coloured revolution". Thefirst stage was the "transformation of society within Moldova" by"discrediting Soviet values, forming a pro-Western mentality and, mostimportantly, creating…total dependence on American bosses". The firsttwo of these sound highly desirable. And the third has not happened:American investors, sadly, are conspicuous by their absence; the USembassy seems rather underpowered, and the best-known American there ,the OSCE Ambassador William Hill, is something of a hate-figure forMoldovan nationalists.But never mind. Olvia-press goes on to outline the other scandaloustactics of the Anglo-American hegemons, particularly a highly sinisterprogramme called "Community Connections" which sponsors "leaders ofpublic organisations, the intelligentsia, journalists andrepresentatives of small and medium business" to go on short trips toAmerica. There, it claims, they are "brainwashed".That paranoid, exaggerated tone highlights the Tiraspolpropagandists' problem. If their system is so wonderful, then why arepeople so eager to go to horrid America? And why is it so easy forWestern propaganda to persuade Transdniestrian youngsters that EU andNato membership via a united Moldova will make them freer and richerthan living in a rogue statelet propped up by Russia? Grudgingly,Olvia-press blames a "certain complacency" among the Transdniestrianauthorities in dealing with the local youth. But it ends up insisting,with beautiful contradictoriness, that a) the American puppets areuseless; b) they steal their backers' money (that implies that thebrainwashing wasn't that effective); c) Transdniestrians love theirgovernment so much that no revolution is possible; and d) that theAmerican behaviour is highly provocative and should stop at once.I decode that to mean that America's democracy-promoters arebeginning to have quite an effect, and the regime is getting worried.Which is good news.

Edward Lucas is central and eastern Europe correspondent for TheEconomist.edwardlucas@economist.com

Tuesday, September 13, 2005

If your job involves Eastern Europe, August looks like a good time forholidays. As in most of the continent, it is a month when officialsare unavailable, government shuts down and people leave the cities tothe tourists.

But history suggests that it is a very good month if your job isjournalism. Among the stories you might have missed if you regularlytake holidays in August are the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, the buildingof the Berlin Wall, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the birthof Solidarity, the first big hole in the Iron Curtain, the botchedcoup in Moscow that marked the end of the evil empire, the collapse ofthe Russian financial system and the sinking of the Kursk submarine.Against that background, how did August 2005 measure up? There havebeen interesting rumblings from Transdniester, and worrying ones fromMacedonia; a Serbian army helicopter planted a church on the top of amountain in Montenegro and the Czech prime minister apologised for thedeportation in 1945 of Sudeten German anti-Nazis. But the month'sreally big news has been from Poland.I don't mean the 25th anniversary of Solidarity's founding, or theopening salvos in the two upcoming election campaigns. Far moreimportant are Poland's rows - a Cold War in miniature - with Russiaand Belarus.Belarus is Europe's only remaining dictatorship, where the regime'slatest target is the country's biggest ethnic minority organisation,the Union of Poles (UPB). This might seem an odd target. Poles inBelarus are not highly politicised and the UPB's activities areinoffensive: chiefly Saturday schools for children, and folk-dancingevents. But the Belarusian authorities are not worried about theintellectual firepower of their opponents. They just dislike the factthat they exist at all. Any independent organisation, especially onewith foreign financial and other support, is a direct challenge to theclosed, monolithic society that the regime desires. So it hasdissolved the UPB and installed a more compliant leadership. It hasjailed Polish-language journalists, harassed activists, and deniedentry to, or deported, visitors from Poland.Although the regime has murdered people in the past, it has not usedforce this time. That's not the case in Poland's row with Russia,which began with the mugging in Warsaw of three teenagers from theRussian embassy. Russia treated this as a diplomatic incidentresulting directly from Poland's Russophobia, and demanded a formalapology. The verbal outbursts were followed by physical retaliation:in quick succession, two Polish embassy officials, and then a Polishjournalist, were beaten up in Moscow.What's ominous here is not that Russia and Belarus are behaving, asusual, unpleasantly. It's that the EU seems to have given up trying todefend its members, like Poland, who most need support. Where were theprotests from other European embassies when Poles were being beaten upin the streets of Moscow?When the new member states joined the EU last year, the bold aim wasto convince Russia that it could be friends with Western Europe onlyif it dropped its historical grudges against former captive nations inthe continent's east. That policy has, so far, failed totally.Instead, Russia is enjoying the sight of the powerful countries ofWestern Europe scurrying away from any possible conflict. It would benice to think that this is just an August blip; that when theimportant people return from their holidays, the EU will come outtoughly in defence of Poland.But I expect they'll play safe. And that, of course, is far moredangerous.

Thursday, September 01, 2005

To raise money for church repairs in my home village in south-westEngland, I have just given an illustrated talk there on 'Scrapes,scoops and spies' in Eastern Europe.

The first problem was showing how countries could appear and disappear- that's startling in a region that has not been near an internationalfrontier since 900 AD.But I found maps showing Europe in 1914, 1922, 1945 and now, whichillustrated well the crucial interplay between history and geography.Nor was it too hard showing resistance to communist rule, and theauthorities' response.For the communist seizure of power in 1945-48, I used pictures of twoof my Czechoslovak heroes, Jan Masaryk (the last non-communist foreignminister, who fell to his death, probably not unassisted, from thewindow of his flat high up in the foreign ministry building) andMilada Horakova. She survived a Nazi concentration camp only to behanged after a communist show trial in 1950.There were excellent pictures, too, of the East German workers'uprising of 1953, of Hungary in 1956, of the Soviet-led invasion ofCzechoslovakia in 1968 and of Solidarity in Poland in 1980-81.But what was missing from the internet were images of the communistsystem itself. (I thought it would be cheating to use commercial photolibraries, so I was relying only on what the general public can findvia the internet search engine, Google.)I searched in vain for illustrations of the degradation andfrustration of everyday life, of empty shops and squalid housing.I did find one picture of the world's worst car, the Soviet-madeZaporozhets - but it was a lovingly restored one owned by an eccentricAmerican collector, not the usual stinking rusty deathtrap.Illustrating the moral dimension, of collaboration and deceit, waseven harder.Some extracts from works by Milan Kundera, Josef Skvorecky and MilanKlima would have done the job perfectly, given the time to read themaloud: the real face of totalitarianism is sad, shabby compromisesmade by sad, shabby people. That is ideal material for novelists, lessso for photographers.It was hard too to explain wear and tear on my own nerves. Westernjournalists behind the Iron Curtain worried often that we wereendangering our contacts, or (occasionally) that they might compromiseus. Soviet-block foreign correspondents in the West were almostinvariably spies; the communist authorities assumed we were too. Thatmeant a regular diet of hassles (ranging from blocked phones tohoneytraps) and threats of expulsion.Sometimes these were comical. In Prague the authorities complainedabout my frequent visits to the British embassy.I was happy to explain that I was going not to pick up secretinstructions, but in the hope that the little shop there might havenew supplies of life-preserving Marmite (a yeasty gunk that Brits eatspread on hot buttered toast).In Soviet-occupied Estonia I was the first Western journalist tointerview the head of the KGB in Tallinn. I started the interview byasking: "Am I the first Westerner to come into this building?" Hereplied coolly: "Let's say that you will be the first Westerner toleave it." I got goosepimples: remembering that anti-communistpartisans sent by Britain (and betrayed by British traitor Kim Philby)had been tortured and murdered in that very building in the 1950s.When the KGB collapsed in 1991, the Estonians found a machine in thebasement that, seemingly, had been used for mincing up bodies. PerhapsI should have got a picture of that.

[ps from Edward: we did use a picture of that mincing machine in the BalticIndependent when I was editing it]

Friday, July 01, 2005

It wasn't tuneful, but it was memorable. I was chairing a conferenceabout `Empire"' in Sweden and on the final evening I got bored withthe official entertainment and suggested a sing-song. These are bigfeatures of British political life, sometimes staged to raise one'sown morale and sometimes to annoy opponents.

When I was a student, in the days when there were still realCommunists who thought the Soviet Union was a "workers' paradise" weused to wind them up with what to my mind is the greatest politicalsong of all time. It is sung to the tune of Clementine and the firstverse goes like this:In old Moscow, in the Kremlin/In the spring of '39/Sat a Russian and aPrussian/Working out the Party Line.(Chorus)Oh my Stalin, Oh my Stalin,/Oh my Stalin Party Line/First he changedit, then rearranged it/Oh my Stalin Party Line.(It goes on: anyone interested in the rest can e-mail me). Next cameRule Britannia – the rarely heard full version, which includes theproto-Blairite lines:Other nations not so blest as thee/must in their turn to tyrantsfall/whilst thou shalt flourish brave and free/the dread and envy ofthem all.To my surprise, that proved popular, especially among the Swedes, whohave not had a maritime empire for some time. But as the evening wenton, politics began to intervene. The Brits wanted the Wacht am Rhein(for those who don't know it, the Nazis sing it in the filmCasablanca) but a senior German journalist vetoed it as "contaminated".Someone else wanted the East German anthem. Admittedly, it has a nicetune and unobjectionable words. But my ex-wife was fromSoviet-occupied Germany and this was the song of the state which wouldhave killed her to stop her escaping. So I squashed that one. Wecompromised on Lili Marlene – but only the first verses. The finalstanza, an erudite American objected, was a militaristic afterthoughtquite out of synch with the melancholy humanism of the rest of it.And then came the Internationale. Everyone knew the tune. Most peopleknew at least some of the words, in some language or another. But wasit right to sing it? My mind went back to another sing-song, studyingGerman in West Berlin in the summer of 1984. Someone (I hope it wasn'tme) started up with Wacht auf, verdammte dieser Erde and most peoplejoined in. But two classmates – Polish nuns, friends since our firstsubjunctive three months previously – looked at us with silent disgustand walked out of the room.And that's the thing about post-Communist songs. There are somesplendidly catchy ones which are so laden with political baggage thatthey are utterly unsingable. Hearing the Anthem of the Estonian SovietSocialist Republic (available, if you're interested, on sovmusic.ru)makes my flesh creep in the same way that the Horst Wessel Lied does.When this song ruled, the real national anthem (My Native Land, MyPride and Joy) was banned. Whistling it could lose you your job, orland you in Siberia.I think the solution is parody. Anti-Nazi Germans in the 1930sproduced stinging alternative versions of the Horst Wessel Lied andthe Polish politician Radek Sikorski (now a Washington think-tanker)has a brilliant, unprintably obscene parody of the Soviet anthem. Thatway you get the fun of a good tune and none of the bad vibes. So doesanyone know a good parody of the Internationale?# Edward Lucas is Central and Eastern Europe correspondent for TheEconomist.

oh my stalin

In Old Moscow, in the KremlinIn the spring of '39Sat a Russian and a PrussianWorkign out the Party Line

Leon Trotsky was a NaziWe all knew it for a factPravda said it, We all read it'fore the Hitler-Stalin pact

Once, a Nazi, would be shot seeThat was then the party lineNow a Nazi's, hotsy-totsyVolga boatmen sail the Rhine/I can bend this spine of mine.

Now the Fuhrer and our leaderStand within the party lineAll the Russians, love the PrussiansTrotsky's laying British mines

Party comrade, Party comrade,What a sorry fate is thine!Comrade Stalin does not love you'Cause you left the Party Line.

Oh my Stalin, Oh my Stalin,Oh my Stalin Party Line;Oh, I never will forsake youfor I love this life of mine.

To the tune of Auld Lang Syne

And should old Bolshies be forgot,and never brought to mind,you'll find them in Siberia,with a ball and chain behind.A ball and chain behind, my dear,a ball and chain behind…Joe Stalin shot the bloody lotfor the sake of the Party Line.

Tuesday, June 21, 2005

I like to think it was the only time in the history of journalism thatnon-Estonians have used Estonian as a common language. I was in Yoshkar-Ola, thecapital (readers will instantly recall) of the republic of Mari-El, 800kilometres east of Moscow.

“Used Estonian” should probably read “tried to use”. My active vocabularydoesn’t go much beyond pleasantries and ordering meals in restaurants. But thestudents I was with spoke it fluently. Their native Mari is part of the same,Finno-Ugric, family of languages, and they had all spent time on scholarships inEstonia. They did not want to talk Russian with me if they could help it: that,they told me, was the “language of the occupiers”.I thought they were joking. But they weren’t. They talked of Russian linguisticand cultural chauvinism with the same resentment that I had heard from Estoniansand Latvians in the Baltic states a decade earlier.Their hero was a local journalist and activist called Vladimir Kozlov. I likedhim a lot: he was clever, funny and sensible. There was no point, he argued, ineven talking about independence. The republic is landlocked, remote and the600,000-odd ethnic Mari are outnumbered by Russians. But it was urgent, heargued, to save the Mari language and culture from extinction. Television andradio broadcasts, and Mari-language teaching, had been cut back very sharply. Ifthat wasn’t reversed, the language would be lost within a generation.That was three years ago. Since then things have got worse, not better, for theMari. Many Mari-speakers have been sacked from jobs in officialdom. The governorof Mari-El, an abrasive man called Leonid Markelov, used police to stop the mainMari political movement holding a congress in December last year. In February,my friend Mr Kozlov was beaten up — on the orders of the authorities, he says.Recently, Mari activists have resorted to meeting in secret forest locations tododge the authorities. That’s highly symbolic: Mari is the last bit of Europewhere traditional pagan worship, largely centred on sacred groves, stillsurvives.Now news of the Maris’ plight has spread. The Parliamentary Assembly of theCouncil of Europe has investigated the issue—although thanks to pressure fromRussia, its report has not yet been published. In May the European Parliamentvoted unanimously to deplore the Mari-El authorities’ ethnic policies. This isthanks to lobbying from the Maris’ ethnic cousins: the Finns (who’ve beenquietly involved for years), the Estonians (much more noisily) and theHungarians. Last week the speaker of the Hungarian parliament, Katalin Szili,said that legislators from the three countries wanted to start formalcooperation with elected representatives from the bits of Russia withFinno-Ugric populations.I doubt the dialogue will be very productive. The Kremlin thinks outsiders’criticism is just a tit-for-tat tactic, aimed at distracting attention fromEstonia and Latvia’s “discrimination” against Russians on language andcitizenship issues. There may be something in that: it is certainly tempting (ifrisky) for former captive nations like the Estonians to tweak Russia’s tail whenthey can. But there is a real issue about the Maris’ rights, and it won’t goaway.And help, from an unlikely quarter, is at hand. This August, the “10th annualInternational Congress of Finno-Ugric Studies” will take place in Yoshkar-Ola.Admittedly, philologists and literary critics are not everyone’s idea of arevolutionary force. But the Mari are thrilled. The conference shows that farfrom being useless peasant gobbledegook (as the authorities regard it), the Marilanguage is something interesting and important. If only my Estonian was better,I’d go myself.

Tuesday, June 14, 2005

One minor plus of my years as a cold warrior was that Soviet-blocpropaganda, though usually mad and horrible, was alsothought-provoking and even useful. Partly, it gave clues about theirthinking: "Why does the Kremlin think this is our weak spot right now,and why are they attacking it this way in particular?". But it alsohelped me think about what aspects of our own system were easy todefend, and what were vulnerable to criticism.

That stimulus has largely withered with communism, and I rather missit. There are still echoes of it in Russia, but the focus is narrow:even the apologists who defend the Stalinist version of history do sofor reasons of neo-imperialism and nostalgia, rather than out ofconviction that Soviet ideology of the time—dictatorship of theproletariat, dialetical materialism and so forth--was actually right.

But that gap is at least partially filled by Belarussian statetelevision programmes. They are direct heirs of now long-forgottenCold-War offerings such as East Germany's Schwarzes Kanal [BlackChannel], whose venomous denunciations of West Germany's decadentwarmongering were the highlight of my week when I was covering the"German Democratic Republic" in the late 1980s.

This week, for example, a top Belarussian propagandist, Yawhen Novikaw(that's the Belarussian spelling: in the Russian that he broadcasts inhe would be Yevgeny Novikov), turned his attention to the BBC andpress freedom in Britain.

"A large-scale political punishment of journalists is taking placeright under their very nose, in their own city of London, and allBritish democrats have buried their heads in the sand: we do not seeor hear anything. If such a shame were happening in any other country,they would come to that country like a clan of crows" he argued.

That's odd. On my many visits to Belarus, I never found any details ofBritish internal politics, let alone the problems of cost-control inpublic-service broadcasters, greatly figuring in popularconsciousness. But Mr Novihaw's lengthy programme did its best to makethe subject of last week's BBC strike interesting and relevant. It wasnot just that the BBC was the subject of a vindictive attack by the"Blair dictatorship", but the "thousands" of human rights lobbies inBritain were hypocritically silent about the BBC's plight.

Personally, I'm rather sympathetic to the BBC management's attempt,albeit belated and very limited, to cut the grotesque overstaffing andextravagance in the corporation. And Mr Novikaw's argument ispreposterous as his facts are wrong: the strike lasted for one day,not five; even the BBC's most ardent defenders do not link the deathof the weapons scientist David Kelly (murdered by Blair's goons,according to Mr Novikaw) to the current rows about job cuts.

But the interesting points are different ones. For a start, broadcastslike these are signs that foreign human rights outfits have theauthorities in Minsk rattled. Belarussian television has been devotingmuch time lately to attacking their funding of local oppositionactivities. A few days earlier Mr Novikaw attacked "the informationwar unleashed against Belarus by Western structures", saying that allrevolutions lead to "blood and devastation".

Secondly, it is precisely because Belarus is a place wherebroadcasters are under government control, and where people dislikedby the authorities do end up dead, that commentators like Mr Novikawneed to maintain that countries like Britain are no better. Highethical standards and strong institutions create the "soft power" thatwill eventually disprove Mr Novikaw and topple his masters. So let'sstrengthen them.

Tuesday, June 07, 2005

Imagine that a gang of thugs in your neighbourhood abducted and rapedyour grandmother 60 years ago, stole and ruined your family property,terrorised your family, and somehow got away with it due to somefailure in the law. Imagine that the gang's grandchildren—who claim tobe respectable citizens—now want to have normal neighbourly relations.Fine, you might think—except that their version of events isdifferent. It wasn't rape, but marriage, they say. The property waslegally transferred. And everyone got along fine. So there's nothingto apologise for.

That's pretty much how the Balts and Poles feel about Russia'sattitude to history. And for the British, these kinds of argumentscan seem rather enjoyable. It is quite satisfying to sit with eastEuropeans, agreeing that the Germans have really done quite well(although of course they will never quite redeem themselves); theAustrians were worse than the Germans and never denazified properly,so we can tut-tut about that. As for the Russians, they really areoutrageous, with their falsified, one-sided view of history. Theydon't acknowledge properly the murder of thousands of Polish officersat Katyn; they haven't really renounced the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact;they even feel nostalgic about Stalin and ignore their own gulags. Nowonder their democracy is skin-deep and everyone hates them.

But just to puncture the smugness, there is another side to Britishhistory which is particularly on my mind at this time of year. That isthe dreadful events of 1945-47, when British and other allied forcesreturned hundreds of thousands of Russians and Yugoslavs to theirdeath at the hands of the Soviet and Yugoslav Communists. These peoplehad surrended to the British and American forces because they knewwhat fate awaited them if they fell into the hands of Stalin and Tito.Admittedly they included Soviet forces who had switched sides andfought for the Nazis, in some cases with exceptional brutality andenthusiasm. In any event, they deserved war crimes trials, and some ofthem, no doubt, the death penalty. But others had committed noatrocities. Some anti-Communist Yugoslavs had actually been on ourside in the war -- at least until we cut off supplies and backed theirCommunist adversaries in Yugoslavia's civil war.

British officials insisted—and sometime still insist—that they hadhonour to the letter the agreements made with Stalin at Yalta andelsewhere. Conditions were chaotic in 1945, with half the continentstarving, tens of thousands of British prisoners-of-war still inSoviet hands, and Stalin extremely popular in both Britain andAmerica. But the story is still a dreadful one. British soldiers andofficials continued repatriating Russians and Yugoslavs even when itwas clear they were being murdered on arrival. They--we if you areBritish—continued even when these people were killing themselves andtheir families rather than be deported. We included people such asRussians born outside the USSR, who were clearly not "Soviet citizens"and therefore not covered by the agreement.

There's not much to be done about it now, apart from mourn andremember. Most of the people who suffered as a result of Britain'sshameful behaviour are dead, so there is nobody left to rebuke us. Butwhen Brits endorse criticism of Russia's historical amnesia, theircensure carries most weight when they also recall that by this time inJune sixty years ago, the first of many tens of thousands of Cossacksand other Russians, who had entrusted their lives to the Britishauthorities, were already dead.

Edward Lucas is central and eastern Europe correspondent of The Economistedwardlucas@economist.com

Wednesday, June 01, 2005

The Eurovision Song Contest is a rare chance for ordinary Europeans toshow their shared appreciation of cheesy music and tinselly smiles.There were some nice notes of European togetherness too: the Croatsgave votes to the Serbs, and the Latvians to the Russians.

The single discordant note was that throughout the evening one countrywas described only by a euphemism—the Former Yugoslav Republic ofMacedonia. In real life, though, only on-duty Greek officials andtheir hangers-on actually use this clumsy formulation. The Greekinsistence on quibbling about Macedonia's name looks ever sillier,more counterproductive and out of date.

It was understandable, perhaps, in 1991, when the British journalistNeal Ascherson described Macedonia as the "Doomsday machine": the onlyplace in the region that could start a pan-Balkan war. Macedonia'sneighbours wanted it strangled—or dismembered—at birth: the Serbsthought it was really southern Serbia, the Bulgarians considered it aswestern Bulgaria, and the Albanians regarded it as eastern Albania. Ifthe Greeks, then the closest approximation to a western ally in theregion, were batty enough to believe it to be northern Greece, whyrile them?

Even so, the reasons why Greece found the idea of an independentcountry called Macedonia so threatening were hard to grasp. I rememberan erudite Anglophile Greek trying to explain it with an analogy. Itwas, he said, as if France broke up into ethnically distinct bits, hesaid, and Brittany announced that it would in future be called theRepublic of Britain. How would we like that, he asked? Surely wewould see this a threat to the territorial integrity of the UnitedKingdom, and insist that the new state be called something else—theFormer French Province of Brittany, perhaps.

I could, just, see his point. Given the dreadful way that Greece hastreated its "slavophone" (actually Macedonian/Bulgarian) minority, Icould see that policy-makers in Athens might be a bit nervous about anindependent Macedonia attracting allegiances across the border. Buteven that didn't seem insurmountable. Rather than bash Skopje, theobvious solution was to be nicer to the Slavs in Thrace.

More than ten years on, the Greek position looks indefensible.Macedonia is a poster-child of post-cmmunist harmony andreconciliation. It is friends with Bulgaria, with the awkward questionof the linguistic differences between the two languages elegantlyparked. Thanks to the common language, Bulgarian tourists love theplace. And to appease the large Albanian minority, and western humanrights doctrine, Macedonia has become in effect a bi-communal state—akind of Belgium of the Balkans. It is messy, but it is working.

Greek businessmen have shown no hesitation about trade and investmentwith their northern neighbour, whatever they call it. So why doofficials persist in their mean-minded attempt to bully Macedonia intoa name change? Macedonia has already changed its flag and constitutionto underline the fact that they don't intend to attack Thessalonika(though anyone who ever thought that was remotely conceivable shouldtry staying off the raki).

But Greece is still insisting that the country should call itself(even in English) Republika Makedonija-Skopje. Bending over to beconciliatory (and keen to get their EU agreement in December) theMacedonians have even agreed that they will use this bizarreformulation in bilateral dealings with Greece. Greece should acceptthat offer at once, end this dismal feud, and get on with moreimportant diplomatic tasks—like preparing for next year's Eurovision.Who knows, in future they might even get some votes from Macedonia.

New blog!

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Regards

Edward

Bene Merito award

Without my foreknowledge, I was last year awarded the Bene Merito medal of the Polish Foreign Ministry. Although enormously honoured by this, I have sadly decided that I cannot accept it as it might give rise to at least the appearance of a conflict of interest in my coverage of Poland.

About me

"The New Cold War", first published in February 2008, is now available in a revised and updated edition with a foreword by Norman Davies. It has been translated into more than 15 foreign languages.
I am married to Cristina Odone and have three children. Johnny (1993, Estonia) Hugo (1995, Vienna) and Isabel (2003, London)